Benghazi and Arab Spring Rear Up in U.S. Campaign

New York Times - 22 October 2012

Mazen Mahdi/European Pressphoto Agency

Protesters on Sunday in Bahrain, where a Shiite democracy movement has been crushed.

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Published: October 21, 2012

BENGHAZI, Libya — When people here talk about American politics, many look to the sky, where the buzz of surveillance drones has grown heavy since last month’s deadly assault on the United States mission in this city in eastern Libya.

Narciso Contreras/Associated Press

Syrian rebels crawled on a sidewalk in Aleppo on Saturday as they tried to rescue a Syrian civilian who had been shot. 

“Give it a rest, Obama,” one resident posted in a Twitter message on Saturday morning, after a low-flying drone woke much of the city. “We want to get some sleep.” 

The drones are a vivid reminder that Benghazi has become the focal point of a fierce debate over what role the United States should seek to play in shaping the new order emerging from the revolts of the Arab Spring, an issue that is expected to be a flash point in Monday night’s foreign policy debate between Mitt Romney and President Obama. 

Yet Benghazi has entered the American political lexicon with contradictory meanings. 

To Mr. Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, the city has become shorthand for the growing threat to the United States from Islamist militants — and what Romney advisers call the Obama administration’s “passivity” in the face of the menace. To President Obama, Benghazi is also the place where moderate Islamists took up arms to defend American diplomats from extremists, a democratically elected president rushed to express his solidarity with Washington and thousands turned out to demand the rule of law and mourn an American envoy. 

The candidates’ differing views encapsulate their approaches to both the Arab Spring and the nature of American power. Mr. Obama has emphasized cautious restraint, out of philosophical support for Arab demands for self-governance and out of a conviction that events in the region are largely beyond American control. Mr. Romney has stressed his wariness of the popular uprisings and vowed a more assertive approach to influencing their outcome. 

That disagreement in many ways mirrors the paradoxical views of America held by many of the region’s people and policy makers, who see Washington as all-powerful but also doomed to self-sabotage whenever it intervenes there. 

Many here ask, nodding toward the sky, has America not learned the lessons of Iraq? 

“People, psychologically, are quite anxious,” said Jalal el-Gallal, a Benghazi political activist, who worries that the pressures of an election year could prompt an American strike on militants suspected in the consulate attack. “It would destroy all the good will that was won over the last two years of engagement, and it could undermine the elected government and make the place ungovernable.” 

More than a decade of public opinion polls have shown that, except for the hope that America might goad Israel toward recognizing a Palestinian state, overwhelming majorities of the populations in every Arab country would prefer a more restrained American foreign policy like Mr. Obama’s. For many, Mr. Romney’s assertion in an address that “there is a longing for American leadership in the Middle East” is not just false but a laugh line. 

If Mr. Obama’s soft touch is popular in the region, however, it may not be in America’s best interest, argued Shadi Hamid, research director of the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. 

“There is a widespread sense in the region that Obama is a weak, somewhat feckless leader,” Mr. Hamid said, citing Mr. Obama’s acquiescence in confrontations with Israeli leaders over settlements and with Egypt’s generals over the prosecution of American-backed nonprofit groups. 

“People think that if you are in a standoff with Obama and you hold your ground, he will eventually back down,” Mr. Hamid said. 

The contrast between the candidates is so stark they sometimes appear to be on opposite sides of the Arab Spring itself. President Obama, his advisers say, began with the premise that the old American-backed order of secular autocracies was already crumbling from within and could no longer promise stability, while the Arab demands for self-governance accorded more with American values. 

“The president made a decision to side with democratic change,” said Benjamin Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, “and we made it clear that it is not our place to dictate the outcomes in any given country.” 

Mr. Romney has emphasized the risks of uprisings. Eliot A. Cohen, a foreign policy adviser to his campaign, said he questioned the concept of an Arab Spring altogether. “It is not clear to me what is germinating,” he said. 

Where the president says he is supporting new democracies, Mr. Romney argues that the Obama administration has, in effect, abandoned the region to forces hostile to American interests. “If you don’t even try to shape events,” Mr. Cohen said, “then for sure you are going to get a bad outcome.”

Neither candidate has fully squared the potential conflicts of American values and interests, a problem most acute in the case of Bahrain. Its Sunni Muslim monarch used brutal force to crush a democracy movement among the Shiite majority, but the island kingdom is also home to the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet and a crucial bulwark against Iranian influence. 

Obama administration officials say they concluded that even the presence of the Fifth Fleet gave Washington little influence over Bahrain’s rulers. Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni monarchies in the Persian Gulf were determined to prop up the kingdom even if the United States withdrew. 

In the most urgent question now posed by the Arab Spring, rebels in Syria are battling a longtime American foe, marching under the banner of Arab democracy and pleading for Washington to supply them with weapons. 

But the Obama administration has nonetheless declined to provide the arms, saying it has too little sway over the direction of the insurgency, the influence of Islamist extremists, the potential that the weapons might be turned on neighbors like Israel or the likelihood of a sectarian blood bath. Iraq, White House advisers say, proved that the United States is ill equipped to manage a sectarian civil war. 

Mr. Romney has vowed to arm the opposition despite the acknowledged risks, as a way of buying an American say in whatever comes next. 

“Sooner or later Assad is going to go down, so you are better off getting in there early to try to shape what you are going to get as a result,” Mr. Cohen said, referring to Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s ruler. “Or the choice is to be passive, as we have been, and watch the void filled by others who don’t like us,” like hard-line Islamists. 

On Friday, the Syrian opposition declared a national demonstration to express its frustration at the American refusal to supply it with weapons. But the Syrian rebels also say they doubt that as president Mr. Romney would live up to his promise or that Congress would let him. “It is just propaganda for the elections,” said Abu Jaafar El Megharbel, an activist from Homs. 

Some regional governments supportive of the rebels dismissed Mr. Romney’s proposal in even stronger terms. “That would explode the whole area, if Romney is serious about it,” warned Amr Darrag, the top foreign policy official of the political party of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the party of the country’s newly elected president. “The difference reflects the good experience of President Obama and a lack of experience of Governor Romney.” 

On the subject of political Islam, the Obama administration concluded that democracy would inevitably empower Islamist parties, leaving the United States no choice but to build partnerships with them. Breaking decades of mutual hostility, the administration has opened cordial relations with the Islamists who dominated elections in both Tunisia and Egypt — in each case, with promises of tolerance, pluralism and constitutional democracy. 

White House officials said they have no bias against Islamist parties. “We will judge these parties not by who they are but what they do,” Mr. Rhodes said. Officials said that responsibility for governing and participation in the political process can have a moderating influence on the movement. “We believe there is a chance for democratic change to undercut the Al Qaeda narrative,” Mr. Rhodes said.

The Romney camp, on the other hand, views Islamists — even the most moderate — as a potentially threatening force. Despite their public statements and recent track record, Mr. Cohen argued, it was premature to conclude that any of the Islamists were committed to democracy. 

“I think we have to be very cautious that it is only a ‘one man, one vote, one time’ kind of process,” he said. “We are going to have a very complicated relationship with these people.” 

To Mr. Romney, foreign aid should be used for political leverage, particularly in Egypt. Mr. Obama has resisted attaching any conditions to the $1.5 billion in annual American aid to Egypt in order to preserve friendly relations and long-term influence. Mr. Romney has vowed to use the money as punishment or reward. 

For example, Mr. Cohen said, Mr. Romney might penalize Egypt’s Islamist government for its slow response when protesters breached the walls of the American Embassy in Cairo last month. “We are not going to give those kinds of sums to people who fail to deliver on their most basic obligations to us,” he said. 

But Mr. Darrag of the Muslim Brotherhood said the aid was not much of a cudgel against a country with an economy of $200 billion a year. “It is just not acceptable for one party to say, ‘We give you this amount of money so you have to listen to what we are saying,’ ” he said. “That is when we get very offended.” 

Such talk was the difference between a candidate and a president, Mr. Darrag said, arguing that governing responsibility would moderate Mr. Romney as well, just as it has previous presidents. “I would say Romney would sound the same as Obama four years after the start of his term,” Mr. Darrag said, “That has always been the case."

 Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting from Benghazi, Libya, and Mayy El Sheikh from Cairo.